Masters of the Universe – A Web Systems Suite

Okay so this is really fun. Just over four years ago I was working at a popular mortgage company as a back-end Tech Lead and was tasked with developing a PHP web framework to replace the dated and abominable system they currently had in place. Their current “framework” was like the ugly bastard child of an MVC… with grade three burns. In other words it was total shit (all these years later and I still seem to harbor a great hate for it). The web had been advancing quite nicely and we were now looking at the birth of Web

Blog Relaunch

So I finally managed to find the time to relaunch this blog. When I first started the blog it was somewhat of an experiment so I didn’t spend much effort on its design, but unlike other failed blogs I’d started over the years I’ve really been enjoying writing these posts and I think this time around it’s got some staying power. This relaunch is really intertwined with my online rebrand I’ve been talking about… lately, this blog plays a big part in my online image and it was important that I spend the time to focus on fixing its issues.

Customizing WordPress as a CMS finishing touches

My last couple of posts I’ve talked about how to customize Wordpress to create your own theme and templates. As I talked about in this post I feel that Wordpress is a hugely powerful CMS admin system but falls behind with its front-end publishing capabilities. I don’t like how it publishes the HTML and in this post I will give some hints as to how to completely abandon the Wordpress front-end for your own.

Create a custom template in Wordpess

1. Open up a new file and add the following:

<?php
/*
Template Name: My Template
*/
?>

2. Save the file in your theme folder with the name of your new template, the filename doesn’t have to be an exact match for the template name, e.g. ‘mytemplate.php’.

Create a custom WordPress theme in one minute

Creating a custom Wordpress theme is damn easy. So easy in fact that when I was originally researching how to do this I didn’t find anything out there that relayed exactly how easy it is. You can find detailed instructions at the official Wordpress documentation, but if you are an experienced web developer and php coder this will give everything you need to immediately hit the ground running.

Using WordPress as a custom CMS

I recently had a crash course in WordPress when I had to build a very custom website from scratch in two weeks from start to finish. It needed to be WordPress because this site will contain a blog that will be handed off to a third party to maintain, and WordPress is arguably the industry standards for blogging software. I wasn’t overly familiar with WordPress, I’d setup a blog or two in my time, but never anything as complex as building a custom theme or plugin. But I basically knew everything I needed to do was possible, I’d read up…